Infertility Options
WASHINGTON — A Senate commitee on Wednesday approved legislation that expands access to infertility treatment for seriously injured veterans.
The bill, sponsored by Sen. Patty Murray, authorizes the Department of Veterans Affairs to cover the cost of in vitro fertilization and other advanced reproductive technologies for veterans and their spouses. It cleared the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs. Read full article.
Italy has violated the rights of a couple carrying cystic fibrosis by preventing them from screening embryos using PGD, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has ruled. The Strasbourg-based court ordered the Italian Government to pay the couple €17,500 in damages and expenses.
Rosetta Costa and Walter Pavan found out that they were both healthy carriers of cystic fibrosis when they gave birth to a daughter with the condition in 2006. In 2010, the couple terminated another pregnancy on medical grounds when the fetus was found to have cystic fibrosis. Read full article.
by S. Fenella Das Gupta, Ph.D., Neuroscience
The past year has been marked (and continues to be marked) by a battle over women’s reproductive rights and health issues. As the election an approach, women’s health issues seems …
Enid Abrahami, a single mother by choice, conceived her first child with her own egg and a stranger’s sperm, thanks to a fertility clinic in New York. Abrahami then gave birth to her son in Israel, where she lives these days. She had no trouble attaining her son’s American citizenship. Abrahami, who has dual Israeli and American citizenship, grew up in both New York City and Tel Aviv.
When she decided to have a second child, Abrahami found that she was having trouble getting pregnant using her own eggs. So this time she used both somebody else’s egg—called a donor egg—and sperm from the same donor used to conceive her son. Again, for her second child, a daughter, the embryo was transferred to her uterus in New York and the baby was born in Israel.
But this time, when Abrahami went to fill out the paperwork for her daughter’s citizenship, a U.S. Embassy official learned that she was a single mom and had used donor sperm. The official then asked her, very directly, if she used a donor egg to make her baby.
“I literally felt like I left my body—it seemed so out of the blue,” Abrahami says. “It was one of the most violating experiences I have ever been through. How could they ask me that?”
Abrahami was told that she could not transfer her citizenship onto her daughter. She was told that citizenship is transferred only through DNA, and that she needed proof that at least one of the donors was a U.S. citizen. Most donations are made anonymously.
Abrahami isn’t the only U.S. citizen facing what appears to be a discrepancy in U.S. law. A child adopted overseas by an American is eligible for U.S. citizenship, but a child created from a donor egg and sperm and born overseas to a U.S. citizen must provide proof that one of the donors is a U.S. citizen. Read full article.
Colorado is America’s personhood Petri Dish, where anti-choice activists first put a question on the ballot (in 2008) about whether to extend legal rights to fertilized human eggs, otherwise known as zygotes.
They lost and tried (and lost) again in 2010, and they’re trying again this year.
As the personhood initiatives have come and gone here, Colorado has seen the different reactions of politicians who endorse personhood when the eyes of everyday people turn toward them, when the wider population becomes aware that they’ve aligned themselves with the personhood folks, who even stand on the fringe of the anti-abortion movement.
As an endorser of personhood, Rep. Paul Ryan is suddenly in this category. Before being selected by Romney, no one except anti-choice activists knew Ryan had sponsored federal personhood legislation, which, among other things, would ban common forms of birth control as well as all abortions, even in the case of rape and incest.
So the question is, now that Ryan’s personhood cat is out of the back alley, what will he do?
Will Ryan, who supported personhood legislation in Congress, stand by his position? Read full article.
(CBS News) Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., an ardent opponent of the contraception mandate that went into effect Wednesday, is comparing the beginning of the mandate to the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the September 11 terrorist attacks.
“I know in your mind you can think of the times that America was attacked,” Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., said during a news conference. “One is December 7th, that’s Pearl Harbor Day; the other is September 11th and that’s the day of a terrorist attack. I want you to remember August the first 2012 the attack on our religious freedom. That is the date that will live in infamy along with those other dates.”
“Today is the day that religious freedom died,” Kelly said.
NEW YORK, June 13 (TrustLaw) – On one side of the border, a woman can see a doctor for free and is guaranteed paid maternity leave. On the other, most women do not qualify for free healthcare and one in five under 65 does not have medical insurance.
These differences and others make Canada the best country among the world’s wealthiest nations to be a woman and keep the United States out of the top five, according to a poll of experts released on Wednesday by TrustLaw, a legal news service run by Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The United States ranked sixth among the 19 countries in the Group of 20 economies, excluding the European Union economic grouping, in the global survey of 370 recognised gender specialists.
Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) is the only reliable method for selecting the gender of a child. Sperm sorting is sometimes used by couples in the hope of increasing the chances of conceiving a child of the desired sex. However, the effectiveness of this method is unproven lacking data from large, multicenter trials.
After an egg has been fertilized in an IVF dish, it is allowed to develop for 3 days. After this, a single cell is removed from the embryo. It is evaluated for Y chromosome (the male chromosome) markers. If these genetic markers are present, the embryo is male. If not, the embryo is female.
The process of PGD does not prevent an embryo from developing normally. The results of the evaluation are available after about 2 days. This means the embryo is transferred to the mother’s womb on the 5th day instead of the 3rd day. This is still within the time frame for successful embryo transfer. This method of determining the sex of an embryo has been shown to be 99% accurate.
Patients sometimes use gender selection if they already have children of one gender and wish to balance their family with a child of the opposite gender. Or, the family may have a history of genetic disorders that are passed down through the X chromosome. These recessive traits typically affect male children because they have only one X chromosome. Choosing to have a girl makes it unlikely that this disease will affect the child. Some patients simply prefer to have a child of a specific gender.
Some people feel that selection of non-essential characteristics like gender is not an appropriate use of medical technology. Others believe gender selection is an aspect of reproductive rights and parents should be allowed to make this decision. The use of this technology to prevent genetic disease or to provide family balancing is typically viewed as less controversial than other uses.
When New Hampshire legislature amended HB 217 to change the proposed fetal murder and homicide charges to apply only to fetuses of 24 weeks gestation and beyond, many politicians and advocates believed the bill was unlikely to have much effect on reproductive rights.